3of5Officials aim to cut down wait times and avoid lines like this one outside the DMV earlier this month in San Francisco.Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

4of5Steve Gordon (left), who was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom to head the California DMV, discusses a report detailing efforts to improve customer service during a briefing in Sacramento.Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

5of5Marybel Batjer displays a report detailing efforts by the DMV to improve customer services during a news conference in Sacramento, Calif., Tuesday, July 23, 2019. Batjer was appointed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, left, to lead a task force in finding ways to improve the troubled state agency. Some of the suggestions include accepting credit cards, upgrade the DMV's website and offer clearer instructions on how to obtain a new federally mandated ID. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press

SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom has plucked a new Department of Motor Vehicles director from Silicon Valley, turning to an IT expert from the private sector to fix problems that Newsom blamed largely on the troubled agency’s “Byzantine,” decades-old computer system.

Steve Gordon, 59, a technology consultant from San Jose, will be charged with cutting down wait times at field offices as millions of Californians apply for new, federally mandated identification cards and restoring trust in DMV operations after the agency flubbed the rollout of an automatic voter registration system.

Newsom credited Gordon’s initiative in seeking out the job as much as his background at Cisco Systems, where he was vice president of technical services from 1993 to 2011, for his appointment.

“He just randomly went on the website and applied for this. I love that,” Newsom said at a news conference Tuesday.

Repairing problems such as those at the DMV is “what he did at Cisco,” the governor added. “He didn’t deal with things that were going well — he only had to address things that were going wrong.”

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Gordon, who was most recently managing partner for the consulting firm zTransforms, will earn $186,389 if he is confirmed by the state Senate. He said he would lead with “a laser focus on customer service.”

“The good news is this problem has been solved by a lot of other companies,” Gordon said. “We’re not inventing anything here. We’re going to hopefully pick the best of those pieces and actually put together something that supports all Californians.”

The DMV has been under intense scrutiny since last summer, when wait times soared to as long as six hours while the agency struggled to process applications for Real IDs. The federal government will require the driver’s license as a form of identification for passengers on domestic airline flights beginning in October 2020.

The team’s recommendations, developed with the consulting firm McKinsey & Co., were also released Tuesday. They will guide what Newsom called a “systemic and sequential” modernization of the DMV, emphasizing a gradual stabilization of its faulty technology and staffing practices rather than a major overhaul.

“We’re not going big here, because we’re not naive to that past,” Newsom said, noting how many California government IT upgrades have failed. “You can’t just throw money at the problem. You have to change culture and you have to change your business process.”

The governor said he visited a DMV office in San Francisco recently and “had a wonderful experience.” He did not say why he went there.

The Legislature already set aside an additional $242 million in this year’s state budget for the DMV, mainly for nearly 1,900 temporary positions and 179 new permanent employees. The strike team encouraged the department to take a more flexible approach to its staffing when the workload increases at different branches, rather than committing to annual plans.

Based on the team’s findings, as many as 28 million more Californians could seek Real IDs before the October 2020 deadline. Every field office in the state will close Wednesday for a half-day of training on how to reduce the time it takes for each of those transactions.

A $10 million media campaign will roll out in the coming months to inform customers about the documents they need to obtain a Real ID and to encourage people to start applying now, in hopes of avoiding a last-minute crush next fall.

The state is also adding 200 self-service kiosks to locations including grocery stores and libraries so people can perform basic functions, such as renewing their car registrations, without having to come into a DMV office.

“If you don’t need to go to the DMV, don’t go to a DMV,” said Marybel Batjer, the former state government operations secretary who led the strike team. Earlier this month, Newsom appointed her as the new president of the state Public Utilities Commission.

Technology companies IBM and CGI have been contracted to upgrade and stabilize the DMV’s systems, which suffer from frequent outages.

One area the strike team report did not address was “motor voter,” which rolled out in April 2018 to automatically register DMV customers to vote. The department botched 23,000 registrations last year, mistakenly signing up people to vote who did not want to and inputting the wrong language preference or political party.

Newsom said a separate audit of that program would be released in the next few weeks.

“I can assure you the strike team, in real time, has anticipated a lot of these findings and has incorporated strategies and solutions to address them,” he said.

Alexei Koseff is a state Capitol reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle, covering Gov. Gavin Newsom and California government from Sacramento. He previously spent five years in the Capitol bureau of The Sacramento Bee, reporting on everything from international recruiting by the University of California to a ride service for state senators too drunk to drive. Alexei is a Bay Area native and attended Stanford University. He speaks fluent Spanish.